By nightfall, they had found a place to sleep out of the wind, in a lee of the mountainside, a grotto with fallen fir trees forming a makeshift lean-to. The dirt floor appeared to have been swept recently, and a circle of stones ringed a dead campfire, now gray ash.
It seemed to reassure Mamoud that other travelers had stayed there, which reassured Jonathan in turn, and Jonathan gladly volunteered to help make a new fire and find a secure place to store their food a safe one hundred feet from their sleeping bags. To protect against bears, yes, if bears there were, but who knew what else lurked out in the dark?
Danny groused a bit at being left out of the preparations, but Mamoud and Jonathan had found common ground in their experience in the outdoors. Mamoud had, after the first day, begun to look at Jonathan with a certain amount of respect—and it was mutual. Mamoud was clearly used to bivouacking out in the open and sleeping rough. And this wasn’t the time to teach others what to do, but to get it done as quickly as possible, before nightfall.
Their calm efficiency and Danny’s rough eagerness to help gather wood—“shrubbery may do,” Jonathan reminded her—contrasted with Alice’s and Rack’s somewhat disdainful tolerance of their conditions. Both stood around a fair amount asking what they could do, arms crossed, while it was done for them. Besides, they would both soon become proficient in shooing away the tiny nectar deer, which buzzed about their heads, perhaps drawn by something sugary in their supplies.
Well, good, maybe they’d bond over a shared dislike of “nature.” Maybe Alice would even stop fixating on the Wobble. The one time he’d taken it out of his pocket, she’d looked hungry again, starved almost. Nor did he appreciate how it had changed again, keeping the usual shape, but turned all seething electric gold across a backdrop of muted greens. There was a grating pulse to it, as if the Wobble were sending out a signal.
But he forgot Alice soon enough, in his delight to see Rack come alive, finally, once Jonathan had the fire blazing and Mamoud got the pot out and some raw ingredients.
Mamoud had gone off on his own to forage and come back with mushrooms and a plucked bird, a rather decrepit headless bird.
“That, my friends … is not a chicken,” Mamoud said. “I don’t know the types of birds, to be honest. But I will have dinner ready for you soon.”
They’d suffered through Mamoud’s bare-bones—often literally—approach to supper enough nights to rouse Rack’s instinct for self-preservation.
“Ah,” Rack said, stepping into the breach, “let me make the stew tonight, mate,” giving Mamoud a comradely pat on the shoulder and tugging the pot handle away from him. “You can make the tea.”
Then he sat down next to Mamoud on one fallen log while Alice, Danny, and Jonathan faced them across the fire on another. There was moss on the log, and some tiny white starfish-shaped flowers and, of course, the ever-present nectar deer, now a nuisance, for they insisted on hovering near their shoulders and buttocks for some reason.
Out from Rack’s pack spilled a veritable richness of spices, which he combined with Mamoud’s “not chicken” and some of Danny’s vegetables—leeks and carrots mostly—and a few other ingredients Rack rifled through his pack for.
Thus equipped, Rack set to the task with gusto and precision. Rack did like to cook when the spirit moved him. He could cook with almost nothing, out of necessity, and given an actual something, Jonathan knew he could be phenomenal. He’d made vegetable samosas once with a phyllo crust so light the contrast of the crust melting in the mouth and the rough hardiness of the potatoes and peas and the hot curry mix had been sublime.
Best not to think of that, given the available ingredients, but Jonathan was surprised, when Rack ladled the boiling stew into their bowls, that the rough-looking chicken had as if by magic become moist and not at all chewy and the stock was the kind of hot-sour concoction best for a cold night, making the nose run.
“Not bad,” Mamoud grudgingly admitted, making even Alice laugh. The face he made was so at odds with what was on offer. Mamoud ate like he was used to fine dining, while Alice ate like someone who had had her food taken from her as a child.
“Tee-Tee recommends Rack should cook dinner the rest of the way, yeah?” Danny said, once more abdicating responsibility for an opinion to her rat.
With dusk came the beauty of the blue polka-dot flowers fully revealed: the blue dots glowed a dim phosphorescence against the darkness, all up and down the trail they were following. There came the gentle popping sound as the blossoms released tiny pulsing blue seeds, taken by the wind, looking like light blue wisps of smoke, quickly dissipating.
It was a cozy sight, although Jonathan also knew that the thick swooshing sounds of the nocturnal flying deer would soon follow. He tried to put them out of his mind because the sound made him a tad nauseated, he didn’t know why. Perhaps because the gossamer wings were more insectile than deerlike. Perhaps because they had yet to actually see one of the giant deer, which were wary and never broke the cover of night, and the sound was more monstrous disassociated from the sight of an animal.
After dinner and the washing up—Jonathan didn’t particularly like scrubbing with snow, which abraded the hands through his pitifully thin gloves—Mamoud told them more about the Comet Man.
“… and when he came out from the crater he had created, now a lake filled with the winter’s snow thawing down from the mountains, he felt an even greater loneliness. Whatever vessel he had used to traverse the cosmic seas had been destroyed, and he must seek company in this place so unlike anything he knew, between and inside the stars.
“So he walked forth and he greeted each animal and plant he saw. With a fiery hug. And each time what he sought to befriend burst into flames and ash.
“The bunnies in their burrows. The skunks and the songbirds, the badgers and the marmots. But not the nectar deer, for they did not live in the Alps at that time. And the trees around the crater all burned down, and a raging fire consumed all life on the mountain peaks around. And the Comet Man was still alone and knew he would always be alone. And so the Comet Man returned to the ruins of his vessel, and as the rains came and after the thaw came and went, and avalanches, his vessel was covered over by the blessed waters and the Comet Man as well. So that ever after he would burn below the lake as embers, as burning loneliness, and the lake waters would be forever warm.
“And the Comet Man might still be alone and look up at the stars and long to be at least a Celestial Beast again. But, on his loneliest nights, he can still be seen roaming this area, a burning figure against the night, trudging through the burning snow. Looking to hug someone who does not want to be hugged.”
“The worst story ever,” Rack said. “What’s the moral?”
“It had its moments,” Danny said.
“A cautionary tale,” Jonathan said.
“Not the version I told you, Mamoud,” Alice said.
“Your version needed a rescue mission,” Mamoud said, chuckling in a good-natured way. “Your version did not fit ‘Puffin Trail.’ ” Jonathan had a feeling Mamoud had had to amuse himself quite a bit while on various missions.
What Jonathan didn’t say was that he had heard this story before, from Sarah, which meant it might be important. But he couldn’t tell how. Mostly, he’d tried to put his mother’s disappearance in the Alps out of his mind. Too painful, still. And it was dangerous to be distracted hiking through unfamiliar terrain. Sarah wouldn’t have liked him to be distracted because of her.
“How do you tell someone who’s just on fire from the Comet Man in these parts?” Rack asked. “Must be hard. Because if you’re on fire you might be the Comet Man?”
Far out in the night came a bloodcurdling bellow, as of some beast offering a reply.
“What in the name of all that’s holy was that?” Rack asked.
“The Comet Man,” Danny said, giggling.
Jonathan exchanged a glance with Mamoud.
“Time to sleep,” Mamoud said. “Alice and I will take the first watch. In case the Comet Man heard my blasphemous version of his tale.”
They turned in for the night, Jonathan on one side of the subdued fire, next to R & D, warm in their sleeping bags, while on the other side A & M, as he sometimes thought of them now, huddled facing out toward the wilderness, engaged in a whispered conversation. Funny how Mamoud deferred to Alice on some things and Mamoud took the lead on others. He still hadn’t worked out the hierarchy between them.
Jonathan looked up at the patch of night sky not obscured by the broken fir trees and was, of a sudden, melancholy. It had come over him fast. A kind of intermingling of residue from the wraith and the sense of Sarah being nearby, but separated from him by a veil. She must have disappeared somewhere close by, back on Earth. Had anyone been with her at the end? Alice and Mamoud didn’t know the details; he needed to find someone who did.
He didn’t mind feeling a little sad, a little down, at times. Especially there in the cold, snug in his jacket and warm hat, by the heat of the campfire, under the stars, with his friends. This was also the first time since coming to Aurora that they’d had a moment to themselves without Alice and Mamoud right there, listening.
“The stars are very different here,” he said.
“How different?” Rack asked.
“You never studied astronomy?”
“Astrology.”
“Well,” Jonathan admitted, “astrology might come in handy just as much here. Given Celestial Beasts and all.”
“It’s beautiful,” Danny said. “The sky.”
“No North Star,” Jonathan said. “No Ursa Minor or Major. No comfortable dot for Mars or Venus.” He wasn’t quite sure he wanted to know the cosmology of the sky above Aurora. It was as disorienting as the expected far-distant sound of deer wings.
“Might be paste diamonds stitched into black velvet,” Rack said, which wasn’t any sort of comfort. “I wouldn’t put it past this place.” His voice was laced with drowsiness and an earnest sort of weariness.
Jonathan wondered if the day had taken more out of Rack than he’d ever admit.
“Do you trust them?” Danny whispered. “Alice and Mamoud?”
Rack snorted. “I don’t know if I trust you, sister-blister.”
Danny sighed. “I’ve told you, it was a few times as a child. I hardly know more than you. For the longest time I didn’t even know I’d gone to Aurora. It was just a different place.”
“What did they tell you? And who told you?”
“It was after our parents died, Rack. The estate agent. I didn’t believe him, but he provided proof.”
“What kind of proof?”
“He brought me across to see the wall on the land bridge to England. It wasn’t safe for long, but a glimpse of that would be more than enough to convince anyone. It’s chaotic magic. Completely bonkers. I’ll never forget it. But that was it, Rack—the three times, the warning not to go back, and to look out for you.”
“If you say so, sister,” Rack said, but much of the sourness had left his voice, for which Jonathan was glad.
Each time it came up, Rack left a little more of his resentment behind. Although Jonathan could understand it. No matter how much Danny thought of Rack as her brother, not just her adoptive brother, Rack must still carry some insecurity with him. About his place in the world. How could he not?
“By the way—I trust Mamoud,” Jonathan whispered, to change the subject. “Jury’s out on Alice.”
Rack snorted again. “Of course you trust the outdoorsman. He could be a serial killer but because he can make a campfire he’s all right by you.”
“Not entirely fair,” Jonathan said.
“They’re both rather fit, Alice and Mamoud,” Danny mused. Perhaps she didn’t realize she was saying it aloud. “Do you think they’re shagging, yeah? Tee-Tee bets they’re shagging. So do I.”
“You like both of them, Danny, just admit it,” Jonathan said.
“Sod off.”
“Sod on, you mean! Don’t let our predicament stop you, Danny,” Rack said. “Go right ahead and involve yourself in some sort of complicated relationship whilst we climb up this misbegotten oversized rock toward a way station that may not even exist anymore.”
“Hey, Alice,” Danny called out. “Are there a lot of tragic love affairs between worlds? Because of the fade?”
A curt reply came back across the campfire. “No. People who cross over are generally too aware of the fade to get involved. You would have to be very, very stupid.”
“What about those who don’t realize?”
“You mean Stumblers? They deserve whatever they get.”
“Did you just make that term up? Well, I suppose you’re right,” Danny said, almost to herself rather than to Alice.
“Well, I’m glad we’ve settled that important issue,” Rack said. “I’m going to sleep now. Or going to try to.” He turned over, struggling with the sleeping bag, which was snug.
“Tee-Tee says good night to all, and to all a good night, yeah?”
“See you in the morning,” Jonathan said.
But in the morning, Danny was gone without a trace, and so was the bear gun.